To paraphrase the not-so-great philosopher Ted Kaczynski: Either we will maintain control of the machines or we won't. And if we do, it won't be you or I who control them, but a small group of elites.
Written by AI, or really trying to sound like it. I feel like the Internet is turning into the joke scene from Real Genius where all of the students in a class deploy tape recorders and the professor is a recorded playback. Machines on both sides of what was a human process.
So this paper appears to be fabricated, but was the conclusion actually wrong? I do appear to perform better on tasks with an external deadline than on self-set ones.
The conclusion is faulty given that it was derived from faulty data. The 2002 paper had two pilot studies and 2 bigger studies. The replication of study 2 failed[1], and the original data has substantial concerning features the rest of the datacolada article lays out. This has two unfortunate implications.
First, if study 2 was not necessary to support the conclusions, it seems likely it would not have been performed or included in this paper. So given it seems necessary, the conclusion is invalid. In past examples (the Reinhart-Rogoff paper comes to mind) when this happens, the authors claim it wasn't necessary and the conclusion is still valid and the professional embarrassment of a retraction is not called for. But in this case the replication failure might stand as a strike _against_ the theory.
But second, this is not the first questionable data coming from Ariely's lab, and it seems unlikely this was a data entry mistake. If study 2 is not trustworthy, we should update our priors about the trustworthiness of study 1. Note it's not guaranteed to be doctored in some way, just worthy of additional scrutiny. And if that one also fails to replicate, the paper and its conclusion seems unsalvageable.
Presumably his coauthor is now panicking about not keeping data from 25 years ago to exhonerate and distance himself.
I think it's simply time to expand our ambition. These programs manipulate language and ideas the way we do, but they still don't care beyond our instructions. Things that we(especially software engineers) expect to take a year can now be done in a month. Fantastic! Now let us use this amplified power to solve problems that were previously too hard to tackle. Maybe aim to solve aging next so that we can stick around long enough to colonize the Local Group.
Is this about Kimi or about Claude? Anthropic is circulating a $200B 2028 revenue target ahead of their IPO. If OpenAI plans to stay private longer, which their recent liquidity event might suggest, why not try and kneecap their competition?
I just assume the worst people in the world will have all the power and push for the most deranged reality possible, and somehow routinely get surprised when it’s twice as bad as I imagined.
The lack of comparable data and testability really does seem to be a challenge. I wonder if people would be more willing to collect and share lots of health data if the collecting company was a non-profit dedicated to anonymizing it.
The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
The translation feature was always there, they just made it so you don't have to press a button to translate a post. Which I guess is nice, but it's like a minor client-side setting. On the other hand, they switched from Google Translate to Grok, which means that now you can't even really trust the translation because, even ignoring the inherent imprecision of an automatic translation tool, Grok is subject to hallucinations has been caught making up posts wholesale.
I find that the translations are way better than they used to, because Grok translates slang and insults more truthfully than Google Translate, and those two things are -- for better or worse -- a large part of the conversations on Twitter.
> each of you interact using your native language with no friction
I wouldn't be so sure about that... Translations contain a lot of telltales and signals - even perfect translations end up as translation-specific dialect separate from natural speeches - and there are significant average content quality differences between cultures. With these signals + differences combined creating a much tighter closed loop than before, it feels to me that it's introducing concept of racial supremacism/classism to a lot of previously unaware people, in which the en-US(or en-GB) culture is not at the top of the food chain.
I mostly only care about the former of ^ that, but I don't like the latter offending wrong set of people, and I think that is slowly going on over at Twitter.
I guess these points can be true but is it worth the cost to avoid them? I much prefer this to the prior status of having friction to see international perspectives at all.
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